Is it still interesting to read, write, or talk about pandemic books?
Here’s the situation: during the pandemic, an author, public speaker and storyteller from Yukon used the lockdown as an opportunity to answer letters that had piled up for them over their years touring in Canada and abroad.
Paying specific attention to the correspondence that spoke to them on a personal level, or to those with most stirring questions, Ivan Coyote assembled these letters and their responses into a book of questions and answers called Care Of, and it is glorious.
Care Of: Letters, Connections, and Curses by Ivan Coyote is what happens when a storyteller is given a pen and the opportunity to take one of the most intimate forms of writing — letters — and gift them to the public. A smart but not cynical look at the world today, each letter and response in this compendium is geared towards fostering queer connections intergenerationally. With a job that takes them away from home 200 days out of the year, each letter in this collection connects Coyote back to the time and place that they received that letter, making for a very nostalgic read.
As a public speaker who shares stories about their rambunctious childhood in Yukon, runs anti-bullying workshops, and talks about their life experience being non-binary and queer, the letters and responses featured in this collection are diverse in their subject matter but all unified in how heartfelt they are. These thoughtful, thankful letters grapple a little bit with the ongoing reality that some of Coyote’s public speaking jobs can turn sinister.
Moving from humour to grief and back again, these letters capture moments in time when loneliness and ambivalence were common and turns all of that into joy and hope.
It’s so cold outside and the only books I really want to read are cozy ones. The quiet format of letters and responses in Care Of makes it feel like this book and the words in it were cherished by someone other than me and then gifted on.
While this book came out in 2021, it made me very aware that we’re in a world where, even now, established authors are publishing their Covid lockdown books — for better or for worse. While entries to the Covid Literature Club include Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, Day by Michael Cunningham, and The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue, all of which reflect on the meanings of loneliness and community, Care Of is among the most thoughtful and stirring of the bunch.